Priscilla Yang and co-workers from Harvard have reported in JACS on the identification of desmosterol needed for heptatitis C virus protein expression and viral genomic RNA. I wonder why JACS has a green text background now in the articles instead of blue…

Francisco Velasquez and co-workers at Merck have reported in Organic Letters on the synthesis of some HCV (hepatitis C virus) NS5B (non-structural 5B) polymerase inhibitors. Someone once told me that when industry publishes in academic journals, it usually means the project was a failure. I wonder if that is the case here.

Istvan Marko and co-workers at Université catholique de Louvain in Belgium have reported in Tetrahedron on a nice synthesis of Telaprevir using an oxaziridine and a lithium amide to functionalize an alkene.

Natural product chemists, whether they are isolation chemists or total synthesis type chemists, all must justify the existence of the field to the layman by claiming that the biological activities of the molecules they either uncover or synthesize are interesting. Sometimes these compounds are way too toxic and unrealistic to be used by patients with diseases, so they argue for those compounds by stating that the toxic compounds are “tools” used in biology. Some way or another there will always be biology intertwined with the chemical structure. Well here is an example of an old familiar compound having new biological activity: